Attachment - Feb 15 2021

Attachment

Feb 15 2021

I think he captured it in a mere two words.

Obliterating sensation

for the act we tactfully call

making love.

Infatuation

compulsion

and consummation, perhaps,

but love?

This word

that by meaning too much

means less and less.

I love her shoes, I love his voice.

Don't you just love it

when the first snow falls?

So where on the scale

from pet to friend

parent to brother

lover to son?

What about longing and lost and one-sided?

And what about opening up

giving all your heart

surrendering yourself?

If love means anything

then it must be as all-encompassing

as the obliterating sensation

of carnal desire.

When time and boundary dissolve.

When the mind is focused

to a tiny point of heat,

and the body turns animal

demanding exquisite release.

To make love

fall in love

be in love.

To ascend

from lust and passion

through intimacy and attachment.

Like the old married couple

who sit across from each other

in the small café

and don't exchange a word.

Her foot, under the table

up to no good.

Not because

after so many years

they have run out of things to say,

but because they're comfortable with silence

and mere presence is enough.

The mature sensation

of deep connection

that will keep serving them well.

Two sovereign people

who became a couple

obliterating their former selves.

Making love

across a small round table,

yet hardly even touching

and uttering not a word.

This poem was inspired by a quote from Ian McEwan's Atonement:

“They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return - they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other's eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped away."

His description – obliterating sensation – struck me as the the perfectly distilled way to describe orgasmic sex. Trying to narrate the sex act in fiction so often degenerates into cliche and purple prose and embarrassed fumbling. McEwan's prose doesn't degenerate. It's deft and evocative. But if he had stopped after these just two well chosen words, he have artfully said all there needed to be said.

It has always struck me that using “making love” as a euphemism for sex debases the word love. And the word love itself has so many degrees of meaning that true romantic love – the kind we celebrate on Valentine's day (which was yesterday!) -- isn't given the consequence it deserves. And while the infatuation of new love comes to mind, what about the quality of attachment that comes with time?

So this poem is both a rumination on meaning in language, as well as a celebration of a particular stage of love that has nothing at all to do with “obliterating sensation”. Even though it obliterates in other ways, and has its own valence of sensation.